Authors ········ Manar Moursi & David Puig
Photos ········· Manar Moursi & David Puig
Published ······ Online, Mar 2015

Section ·······  Art & Design

Unlike other crowded cities of the world where destitute people seek permanent refuge on the sidewalk, very few people live and sleep on Cairo’s pavement. Instead, sidewalk sitting is a temporary respite on a chair. Cairo packs and unpacks itself daily and it is perhaps a maritime image that best captures its regular fluctuations: phases of low and high tide on its sidewalks in the course of twenty-four hour cycles. Cairo does not wake up early. By mid-morning, shops lift their metal curtains, informal vendors begin setting up their stalls, and food kiosks and coffeehouses open for business. Chairs slowly spread to the streets and as the day progresses their density rises to the highest level. In the warm months and during the celebrations of Ramadan, when people gather more outside and stay up late, it is during the nights that chairs become more visible. The biological clock of street chairs is set to the nocturnal habits of Cairenes. At the time of closing, café-boys pile up chairs in tower-like structures and lock them up until the next morning. When they retreat from the streets to their tiny rooms, doormen carry their chairs indoor and park them in a corner at the entrance of their building.



There are areas of the city less affected by this tidal logic. Built on reclaimed desert land to the East and the West of the city, the new residential suburbs can be seen as satellites outside of the orbit of Cairo. In the upscale settlements of New Cairo and 6th of October, the number of chairs is almost constant throughout the day and night. It is also reduced since it is a world of wide avenues and gigantic blocks made for cars. Social life does not take place on the pavement but in malls, restaurants and private clubs. Each house is an isolated entity with hardly any contact with its neighbours. The majority of chairs on the sidewalk are the seats of private security guards hired to watch over wealthy residences or half finished apartments. They are either planted in manicured lawns or face grey buildings awaiting completion. Usually framed by a slim security booth, they stand twenty-four hours by the front wall of villas, travelling in and out of their shack but never leaving the area they are supposed to protect.



If some chairs have a limited mobility, others undertake longer journeys through the city. From time to time, it is possible to spot a chair, moving through the street in an open cart attached to a bicycle. Those are the old and broken chairs bought by robabekya, vendors who roam the streets in search of discarded objects that can be fixed and reinserted into the veins of Cairo. The circulation of seats in the city can thus be seen as an inverted version of the musical chairs game. Occasionally, it is chairs that revolve and move around people until they find new partners, and not the other way around.


In the streets of Cairo, chairs can have many incarnations, passing from one set of buttocks to another, supporting generations. In between assignments, some can be temporarily relieved from their mission; packed in balconies, thrown on rooftops, hanging legs up on fences or telephone booths. Demobilised, they wait to be called again to the front lines of the city. A couple of nails, a pirate leg, a few carton boards can bring to an end a season in the purgatory of chairs. At the hands of a new owner, an old chair can come back to life.



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You can support Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo's crowdfunding campaign. Pre-order your copy at bit.ly/sidewalksalon